The sources of art (capital 'A')

Where does great literature and art come from?  [ETA: A more accurate version of the question might be: How is it produced or generated?] Herewith a couple of perspectives, not original of course (though the labeling may be).

The first could be called Individual Genius Meets An Imperfect World.  The artist converts personal misery into art (consider, e.g., how much mileage Dickens got out of his relatively short time in the 'blacking' factory).  The misery can be collective rather than strictly personal (e.g., no Napoleonic wars, no War and Peace).

The second perspective could be called Individual Genius Meets Its Predecessors.  The artist struggles to carve out her or his own terrain in conversation with, or response to, what others have done.  This is about the anxiety of influence, in Harold Bloom's well-known phrase.

The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive.  A given work can respond both to an external event and to the influences of the artist's predecessors (or perhaps contemporaries).  

Does great art require the prod of misery, frustration, injury, imperfection, unhappiness, injustice?  Would there be great art in a utopian society?  My impression is that some sketchers of utopias (say, the nineteenth-century utopian socialists, or Skinner in Walden Two) have not been much concerned with this issue.  Where is the Marxist tradition on this?  Is the whole notion of great art a decadent bourgeois concoction?  Are the question's assumptions irrelevant or meaningless in a communist society where, as Trotsky apparently thought, the average level of human creativity would rise to heights never before seen?  In the absence of empirical evidence on the last point, I guess we're all free to speculate.

Sykes-Picot anniversary

A couple of academic-style events mark the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement (there are probably more, but these are two I noticed): a symposium tomorrow (May 17) at the Wilson Center (find it here; live webcast) and a symposium that was held this afternoon (May 16) at AEI (here; video apparently available).  

Noted

For those with access to Perspectives on Politics, the article in the current issue on the UN, Haiti, and cholera looks esp. interesting.  Don't have time to write about it now but will do so later (where "later" = probably not for several weeks).

On another subject: the economist Lester Thurow has died.  He was writing about inequality well before it was a fashionable subject for most mainstream academic economists.

Do something else with your life

From a critique of the GRE, which is the exam one usually has to take when applying to grad school in the U.S.:

Grad-school admissions is a competitive venture; researchers call grad school a “high-status opportunity.” For Fall 2014 admission, 2.15 million students applied to graduate school in the U.S.  Only 22 percent of the doctoral applicants and about 48 percent of the Master’s-degree applicants were accepted, however. Score well on the GRE and your odds of entry to this high-status opportunity look better. Don’t score well, and—at least traditionally—you may have to consider something else to do with your life.

Which might be, regardless of how well (or badly) you do on the GRE, a very, very good idea.

The art of the blurb

Writing a thoughtful book review takes time and effort, but writing a snappy blurb for a book is a skill in itself.  In my mailbox today was a Cambridge Univ. Press brochure advertising its recent and forthcoming international-relations titles, one of which is an edited volume Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics.  The blurber is James Der Derian, who says (inter alia): "This collection has the jolt of an intellectual defibrillator, bringing diplomacy back from a grossly exaggerated death while nurturing emergent forms of global mediation."

All I can say is: the book damn well better have the jolt of an intellectual defibrillator, because the title has the anti-jolt of an intellectual soporific.

Round-up

I happened to hear just now most of a Friday round-up of world news with three knowledgeable journalists.  It was the Diane Rehm Show but, thankfully from my standpoint, Rehm herself was not there.  (I have nothing at all against Rehm personally and I recognize that she's had a highly successful career; I just basically can't listen to her.  I realize that's not an especially nice thing to say on the verge of her retirement, but so be it.)  Anyway, there was a good discussion of, among other things, the mess that is the Syrian situation and, at the end, a brief discussion of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who died recently.  More about him later, perhaps.

An interview with Dukakis

Slate has an interview with Dukakis (h/t).  He criticizes HRC strongly on Syria and Libya and then proceeds to say he is supporting her for the nomination ("views change," he says).  Dukakis also has things to say about Scalia, who was a law school classmate of his.  And on NATO, Dukakis says:

I don’t understand why we are expanding NATO, do you? What the hell is this? NATO was designed to stop Russia or the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. That is not going to happen for the next 300 years. 

Churchill once more

I haven't done more than glance at the transcript of the most recent Clinton/Sanders debate, but I gather from this that there was a question about which foreign leader the candidates took inspiration from when it came to foreign policy.  Not an easy question to answer on the spur of the moment, especially if you've been absorbed in a presidential campaign for months.  Sanders's answer was Churchill.  We've been over Churchill, so to speak, here before, for instance here (and also see the comment thread, where the Bengal famine gets mentioned at the end), so I don't see the need to rehash this again, at least not right now.

Biopolitics, refugees, and other matters

It can only be a matter of time before biopolitical takes on the current European refugee/migrant crisis begin showing up in the IR journals (and other journals).  Since the crisis revolves in large part around bodies and their relation to states, it would seem tailor-made for such treatment.  Although I think I understand at least a few of the basic notions, I can't say biopolitics "does" much for me in an intellectual sense.  Thus when I learned, via a recent comment thread attached to this post at the USIH blog, that there has been a biopolitical appropriation of Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies, I was interested but not bowled over.  As I mentioned on the same thread, I cited The King's Two Bodies in my dissertation, which did not address biopolitics; I also mentioned that I had not actually read the Kantorowicz straight through (or even come anywhere close to doing so), but basically had only pillaged, with appropriate attribution of course, a couple of its footnotes that related to my subject.

Sewell on the capitalist epoch (and its possible end)

Following someone's Twitter trail, I came upon an entire issue from 2014 of the journal Social Science History that has been made freely available (link). It contains an address by sociologist William Sewell, as well as a piece by Julian Go on British imperialism 1760-1939, among other things.

An unrealistic summer reading list

The Patterson School's 2015 summer reading list, linked by Farley here, strikes me as unrealistic in the sense that I don't know who except for a speed reader is actually going to plow through every word of eight pretty hefty books (one of which is Piketty, btw) in the space of a month or two.  The prefatory note says something like: "get an iPadAir2 and take advantage of your spare hour or two at the beach or in the mountains."  Ok, whatever you say.  The inclusion on the list of Bass's The Blood Telegram is interesting; I reviewed a book on the same subject, Raghavan's 1971, on this blog some time ago (here).  

On "turning points" and "critical junctures"

It is a truism that historical narratives impose a pattern on the past.  Narratives demand a structure, which the messiness of reality resists.  Hence historians' talk of "trends," "major developments," "main events," "phase transitions," "turning points."  Most writers deprived of recourse to these sorts of words and phrases would probably produce something either unreadable or confusing, or both.

Moreover, historians have long understood that metaphors -- tides, winds, take-offs, etc. -- can help make their narratives more vivid.  To take a not-quite-random example, E.J. Hobsbawm, in his chapter on the industrial revolution in The Age of Revolution (Mentor paperback ed., 1962, pp.45-6), borrowed the phrase "take-off" from W.W. Rostow.  Hobsbawm wrote:

...[S]ome time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies.... This is now technically known to the economists as the 'take-off into self-sustained growth'.... [C]areful enquiry has tended to lead most experts to pick on the 1780s...as the decisive decade, for it was then that, so far as we can tell, all the relevant statistical indices took that sudden, sharp, almost vertical turn upwards which marks the 'take-off.' The economy became, as it were, airborne.

***

The recognition that history has to be narrated and that most narratives involve the imposition of pattern and order has given rise to at least two sorts of academic controversies, or, to use a perhaps better word, conversations.  Both of these conversations themselves have a long history, but to simplify things we can restrict ourselves to their recent installments. 

One of these discussions has revolved around issues of objectivity and truth.  As recounted by Andrew Hartman in A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015, pp.259-60), a divide emerged or re-emerged in the 1980s and '90s between those historians who, influenced by postmodernism, were inclined to emphasize the subjective dimension of historical narrative, and those who stressed, in the words of the authors of Telling the Truth about History (1994), "the need for the most objective possible explanations...."   Much could be said about all this, but it's not the focus of this post.

A second scholarly conversation, the one with which this post is concerned, involves the question of continuity and change.  Almost everyone agrees that these are not completely opposed categories.  There is no such thing as a completely static social system, and even those that appear to be static are subject to changes or variations in the course of reproducing themselves, as sociologist Wilbert Moore, among many others, pointed out (Social Change, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp.11-16).  The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put a very similar point this way: "Every actual use of cultural ideas is some reproduction of them, but every such reference is also a difference.  We know this anyhow, that things must preserve some identity through their changes, or else the world is a madhouse" (Islands of History, Univ. of Chicago Press, paperback 1987, p.153).      

The proposition that continuity and change are not cleanly opposed categories, that no change is ever total, doesn't resolve the issue, of course, but simply opens it.  Which changes are more or less important, and how does one decide?  John Lewis Gaddis has endorsed another scholar's suggestion that historians should look for "a point of no return," i.e., "the moment at which an equilibrium that once existed ceased to do so as a result of whatever it is we're trying to explain." (Gaddis, The Landscape of History, Oxford Univ. Press, 2002, p.99, citing Clayton Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation, 1996.)

Somewhat more helpfully perhaps, Paul Pierson, a political scientist, has emphasized in Politics in Time (Princeton Univ. Press, 2004) that the evolution of societies or institutions is often heavily influenced by relatively small events that happen early in a developmental path; that is, he stresses the "self-reinforcing" character of path-dependent processes.  Pierson cites (pp.52-3) as one example his sometime co-author Jacob Hacker's "analysis of the development of health-care policy in the United States...."  The failure to adopt national health insurance during the New Deal "generated powerful positive feedback, institutionalizing a set of private arrangements that made it much more difficult to make a transition to national health insurance at a later point in time" (emphasis in original).  In other words, the U.S.'s failure to adopt national health insurance in the 1930s was not a dramatic-appearing event, but it had long-term consequences for the direction of future policy.  This is the sort of 'self-reinforcing' effect that Pierson suggests occurs quite often.  

This point that "critical junctures" need not be large-scale, big-bang events -- that they can even be the failure of something to occur, rather than a positive occurrence -- is a significant one, as are, no doubt, some of the other arguments in Pierson's book (I haven't gone through all of it carefully).  But I suspect that, in the end, an element of subjective judgment is inescapably involved in deciding what counts as a critical juncture or a turning point, except for a few obvious instances that would garner wide agreement.  Some may find this a disappointing conclusion, but so be it.

Added later: See also Michael Bernhard, "Chronic Instability and the Limits of Path Dependence," Perspectives on Politics (Dec. 2015): 976-991.

Paris or San Salvador?

There is an establishment in one of the little malls near where I live called La Baguette de Paris. The stenciled slogan in the window reads: Pan fresco todos los dios. Just noticed it last night while walking past it, but I plan to go inside the store soon. I doubt many people's attention is caught by the juxtaposition of languages, but mine was.  As I've had occasion to remark previously, a knowledge of French is useless in my neighborhood, whereas being able to speak Spanish is very useful.

Reading and other notes

I don't read many novels, nor do I much try to keep up with what's being published. (I get the NY Times Bk Review in my in-box on Fridays but it, more often than not, sits there mostly unread.)

However, I've lately been reading (and am close to finishing) Ian McEwan's The Children Act (2014), which is competently done, a fairly quick read, and fairly absorbing, if not deep with a capital D.  And last night I happened to hear a radio interview with the author of the recently published The Sympathizer (link), which seems to have gotten very good reviews.

I'm also pretty much finished with a non-novel, J.T. Johnson's Sovereignty: Moral and Historical Perspectives (2014), and will be posting a review of it fairly soon.

I also finally bought (this aft.) a very-much-needed computer to replace my current one, although, true to form, I have yet to remove it from the box. All in good time.

Rude awakening

The cherry blossoms are out here, the fairly horrible winter is over, and at about 5:45 this Sunday morning some people -- presumably young men; who else would be such jerks? -- decided to rev their hot rod's engines very loudly and continuously for roughly fifteen minutes -- though it felt more like an hour.  Eventually I saw a police car cruising around, but by then the malefactors were gone.  If you infer from this that I do not live in one of the fancier suburbs of Washington, D.C. -- the sorts of places wherein reside (some of) the people who make (some of) the policies often critically examined on this blog -- well, you are so damn right.

Quarter-truths

The notion that there is one broad path to modernity, that 'developing' countries will come to resemble 'advanced' ones in key respects, is an old idea, and it's part of the semi-conscious mental equipment that a lot of educated Westerners (as well as some non-Westerners, often with Western educations) carry around with them.  It sometimes gets expressed in passing, in contexts where it's not especially crucial to an argument and might therefore not attract much notice.  The example I currently have in mind comes from a recent article about Tocqueville in the American Political Science Review, the author of which, at the end of the article's introduction, writes that:

...[A]s places that once lay outside the scope of Tocqueville's thought come increasingly to resemble the West, his analysis of the moral psychology of modern democracy only becomes more broadly relevant.  As they modernize, developing nations will see more of themselves, for better or for worse, or for both, in Tocqueville's portrait.

These sentences appeared in an article published in November 2014, but they could as easily have been written a half-century earlier.

Alongside this narrative of Westernization, another narrative is also part of the semi-conscious assumptions of many educated Westerners; one might call this one the clash-of-civilizations, or more colloquially, the they-hate-us narrative.  One recalls the sometimes plaintive, sometimes bewildered "why do 'they' hate 'us'?" question voiced after 9/11.  In this narrative, modernization-as-Westernization produces a severe reaction, portrayed most obviously (though not only) as religiosity vs. secularism.

Both these narratives are quarter-truths (a notch down from half-truths) at best, but their presence in the discursive air suggests that quarter-truths can be durable.

Added later: Not posting on the Israeli elections because one can find plenty of discussion of that elsewhere.  This blog does not have the capacity or (always) the inclination to chase the headlines.  (If you want that, go to LGM.)         

Tuesday linkage (abbreviated)

-- Corey Robin on a panel discussion with Steven Salaita and Katherine Franke at Brooklyn College: here.

-- J.W. Mason on Coriolanus (plus comment thread): here.

Wed. eve. linkage (abbreviated)

-- The Disorder of Things recently ran a series called "The Global Colonial 1914-1918." Lucian Ashworth's post, the first in the series, looks to be worth reading, though I've not done more yet than glance at it. [Update: I've now read it; see the discussion in comments.] The other contributions also seem worth a look.

-- There's a post and discussion at the USIH blog about a review in New Left Review of The Great Persuasion. Since I've read neither the review nor the book, I don't have a lot to say about it right now.

-- Craig Lambert's profile of Orlando Patterson (in Nov./Dec. Harvard Magazine) is interesting, though I raced through it. A more careful reading might be in order at some point. [Update: Read it properly now. A good piece.]

A dumb name for a drink

From a good reporter, Juliet Eilperin, a less-than-earthshaking piece about Takoma Park (Md.) and (among other things) its connections to the upper reaches of the Obama admin. A brief excerpt:

The elevation of this community of fewer than 18,000 residents to the highest echelons of government speaks to the influence of progressives in the administration — a bent that will become more pronounced during Obama’s final two years in office, even if Republicans make major gains in next week’s elections. But it also underscores how, for all of its radical leanings, the city has moved closer to the mainstream than one might think. Its residents are no longer fighting the power; they are the power.

A decade ago, Takoma Park’s downtown economic anchors included a yoga studio, a pet food store that sponsored animal rescues and a music store. Those businesses have survived, but that strip now has two coffee shops, three restaurants that serve alcohol and a hardware store. Where Murphy’s Auto Parts once stood is now the upscale restaurant Republic, which offers not just a duck confit Cubano sandwich but a “Fascist Killer” specialty cocktail that features Old Scout bourbon, Amaro Averna, basil and lemon peel.

Bourbon, basil, and lemon peel = yuk. And "fascist killer" is a stupid name for a drink.

Tocqueville and Napoleon

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805, the year of Napoleon's victory over Russia and Austria at the battle of Austerlitz (one of the consequences of which was that, the following year, the Holy Roman Empire finally went out of existence).

Was Tocqueville one of the many caught up, retrospectively, by Napoleon's mystique, one of those who breathed in what David Bell (see the previous post) refers to as the "intoxicating fumes" of Napoleon's legend?  Apparently yes, at least to some extent.  In Tocqueville's Discovery of America (pb. ed., 2011), Leo Damrosch writes (p.187) that Tocqueville "was quite starstruck by the memory of Napoleon, much though he deplored his imperial rule," though Damrosch doesn't cite a passage from Tocqueville in this connection. 

Damrosch does, however, quote Tocqueville's reaction to hearing the Duke of Wellington speak in the House of Lords: "La gloire is invested with such extraordinary prestige that when I saw him take off his hat and begin to speak, I felt a shudder run through my veins" (Voyage en Angleterre, 1833).  T. evidently had a weak spot for generals, especially perhaps titled ones, who had won famous victories. Damrosch: "Tocqueville believed that only great generals, like ... Napoleon and Wellington, deserved political eminence" -- unlike Andrew Jackson, whom T. did not see in that light.